


Your Heart Held Out Like A Tin Cup To Catch The Rain

by philomel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-05
Updated: 2011-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philomel/pseuds/philomel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there's one dream left, Dean is going to hold on and keep it there, as long as he can.</p><p><span class="small">Spoilers: Nothing post-4.13.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Heart Held Out Like A Tin Cup To Catch The Rain

It's kind of the story of America. Gas tank's empty and you're riding on hope.

Hope won't get you to the nearest station. But your feet might. If they weren't dragging, fresh wound eating at your side, opening a little more with every other step. Like a gaping mouth, when you check it. He says _leave it_ , mutters about infection, dirty fingers, re-sticks the adhesive tape before you have a chance to swat his hands away. Before, you would have prodded the wound of his pride, pointed out his own dirty fingers, pointed out whose slip-up got you into this mess. Now you just watch the gauze pucker over your skin, red reaching up into it.

You pull out from the inside. No one's supposed to see that.

But no one's like Sammy.

Still, you shove him off five times before you finally let him take your weight, arm hooking around your waist and drawing you into his side. A pair of siamese twins, conjoined somewhere that no one can see. One got the height, the other got the looks — you joke in your head. But really you got everything, 'cause you got Sam. So you don't make the joke out loud. It's hard to breathe anyway, concentrating against the tenacity of pain, against the gravity that kicks up from beneath in the dust and gravel, against the rapid push of your pulse all thick and dull at the back of your throat.

He makes you stop once. It's worth it for the drink, whiskey burn clean down your gullet.

The second time he tries, you pull him forward. _Keep going_ , you say. _Or stay for the night._ You don't have provisions for that, not either of you. Not that you haven't made do with a flask and rolled up jackets for pillows before. But those were younger days. Days when you sprang back up like a trodden blade of grass. Now you're less resilient. You don't give up, but it takes a lot of fight not to give in. So. Logic wins out. Always the best gameplay with Sam. Besides, it's easier to keep moving, harder to restart yourself after your muscles have learned the luxury of rest.

Sam sighs and keeps walking. You feel it against your temple like the ghost of a breeze. The wind picks up and steals it away. But no matter, the thieving wind. A full storm could come, and you know you'd still have Sam at your side.

The station is haloed in the glow of crackling neon by the time you get to it. The flat fields stretch into blank darkness behind the squat building. There's a bar down the road, and a motel right beside it. You do the math. Two was always greater than one. Baby makes three, but the car'll be fine for one night. Ain't nothing but crickets and birds around where you left her. And if there's birdshit spotting up her paintjob in the morning, you'll curse the birds back to the hell you came from, but it's nothing a rag and a little elbow grease won't take care of.

Bar's got food, or something marginally more nutritional than air and whiskey alone. You grease your lips with fry after fry, numb your tongue with the coating of salt. You watch him pick up the edge of wilted lettuce and let it drop. He puts the burger into his mouth with a look of resignation. Someday, maybe next town, you're gonna find a decent grocery store that's not a glorified mini-mart and you're gonna buy some real food the way real people do — collected in a cart, not the clutch of your hands. And you're gonna get a room with a kitchenette and make something from scratch. Something that, if it's burned, it's burned because you did it. Or if it's undercooked, it's because you got impatient. No one else to blame, no one else to pay either. You curl up your last limp fry and eat it, thinking of homemade spaghetti and meatballs, wondering if it still counts as homemade if you get the sauce from a jar. While Sam unfolds some bills and you empty your beer bottle, you remember Mom's pale hands, the whir of the can opener and the smiley-faced noodle on the label of SpaghettiOs and you think, yeah, jarred sauce will be good enough.

A single at the motel will have to be good enough. Flood brought mold to the lower rooms, and the second floor's small—half of it gone to the manager’s own apartment, the rooms on the other half mostly filled with truckers needing more than a cab bed for the night. _Unless you want to wait an hour or two_ , says the woman with the smoker's gravel in her voice, etches in her face, yellow in the platinum tease of her hair. You can hear the tell-tale _thumpthumpthump_ without having to follow the roll of her eyes to the ceiling. No, a single will do. You've done with worse.

You're still smirking like a twelve year old when you pass the door where the thumping is louder, and faster. Sam is grimacing. His frown reminds you of that symbol he showed you, from music class, elementary school, second half of fourth grade for him, seventh for you, third town since the new year that year, ninth time in Georgia. A bird's eye, you remember and see it clear. A perfect arc over the dimple in his chin.

The dimple is more of a line than a dot, but you always see what you need to see and none of the superfluous stuff. Your eyes have been honed, keen for the necessary details.

But sometimes you miss things. You'll own up to that. Like the way you didn't see what you didn't want to in Sam. Back when he was leaving, when he needed to get out and you knew he should go, but. But for the part of you that didn't want him to go where you couldn't follow. And didn't you follow anyway? Stubborn and stuck together like a cracked handle on a badly glued cup. You insinuate yourself back into his life, wiggling around, trying to fit even where the pieces are missing.

Not once but twice now. But this second time, you went away and left him. And you thought he'd be fine, but turns out you were wrong. Missed again, Winchester. And didn't your daddy teach you better than that?

This time you're sticking by him. It's not like you have any other choice, either of you. Because, yeah. You see it. You see it now how stuck your brother is. All his dreams, all the things he could have been. They're like stars, but really just halogen lights reflecting in his eyes. You've watched them blink out, not realizing, all this time. But if there's one dream left, you're gonna hold on and keep it there, long as you can.

Even if it's Lilith's head on a platter. _Dream big, Sammy_ , you think. It's not like you'd ever deny him.

But what would he deny you? When you look at him in the flickering lights of the hallway, watch the down curve of his mouth as he fumbles with the key in the door, you think about the line in his chin. You think about how your thumb would fit into it. Over it, mostly, but you can almost feel, just nearly feel the way it would cradle you. Not perfect, but near right as anything. You think about the way his head used to fit in your lap, when you were too big to both sleep stretched out in the backseat while Dad drove and drove, the engine drone and BTO for lullabies. You think of the bony jut of his jaw against your thigh, the pins and needles in your leg, the warm spread of drool on your jeans. You remember falling asleep quickly and sleeping soundly with good dreams or no dreams — which is just as good for you these days.

You think of the way you didn't know if you were topside again, didn't really know for sure until you were in Pontiac, in that hotel, in Sam's room with him in your arms. That's when you remembered who you were. Who you are.

They say Hell is other people. But Sam's not other people. He's all you've got.

He says _I got you_ when you stumble a bit with your shoes. Alcohol and the angle of your torso toward one side, trying not to pull at your wound, tipping you off balance. Laces not coming undone right, mud caking the knots, not helping. Sam's hands fit over yours, too big. Longer fingers, wider palms. He helps you out of your shoes, eases you onto the bed. Taller like this, looming, tree-like. Feet rooted on either side of yours while he bends over you, peels the gauze from your side. _Sorry_ , he says, and means it but doesn't, when the peroxide bites and fizzes at your red skin and you wince. But it doesn't hurt as bad as it did. And he isn't any sorrier than you all the times you patched him up. All the times you held him together with Band-Aids and wrapped cloth, frayed tape and black thread, a lame joke and a kiss to the forehead. All the times you put him back together, hoping. Living on that hope.

It's not much to live on, but what else do you have?

You say _Goodnight, Sammy_. Face to face on a single bed, barely fitting, limbs bent up, tucked awkwardly to accommodate each other, you watch your brother fall asleep. You know your shoulders will be stiff in the morning, your wound tighter and sore. You know breakfast will be Slim Jims and Dr. Pepper from the gas station because the bar will be closed. You know the walk back to the car will be shorter not because you'll feel a little better, not because you'll be rested and fed, but because you always walk a little faster when you know you're going home.

And you know Sam will be there when you wake up, be there to _rock-paper-scissors_ for first shower, be there to change your bandage though you're perfectly capable of doing it yourself, checking on your wound for the hundredth time like Florence fucking Nightingale. And you will call him that. You know he will scowl and sigh and scrunch up his face at every dumb joke. It's what you do; it keeps you going. You hope it keeps him going too.

When you walk back to the car, you know he'll be by your side, gas sloshing in the can he'll insist on carrying, while you kick up gravel, dust settling over your shadows.

**Author's Note:**

> • Beta: raynemaiden.
> 
> • Title shamelessly stolen from Jeffrey Foucault’s “Shadows Tumble.”
> 
> • This is the bird’s eye, more formally known as a _fermata_ or hold symbol, Dean was thinking of:
> 
>   
> 


End file.
